Akihiko Shinya
NTT Nanophotonics Center, Japan
Nanophotonics Technology for Photonic Integrated Circuits
Abstract
The superiority of light in communications has led to great success in long-distance communications, and now light is being used in optical interconnections that take advantage of its broadband for inter-chip and intra-chip communications. In this talk, with the aim of extending the role of light from communications to calculation, we will discuss circuits in which optical and electronic elements are fused at the calculation level. The circuits we propose are optical digital circuits based on binary decision diagrams (BDDs) and optical analog circuits using optical interference. In these circuits, light operations are basically performed simply by propagating light along the electrically controlled optical paths. For example, when all the light gates are operated at once by parallelized electrical input signals, a calculation can be completed within the light propagation time. Moreover, the accumulation of electrical RC delay in the optical gates is minimized. Silicon photonics can provide an optical gate of several hundred micrometers, which corresponds to a light propagation delay of several picoseconds per gate. Furthermore, in linear analog operation using optical interference, the propagation time per gate can be reduced to several tens of femtoseconds. In addition, photonic crystal technology and plasmonics technology have been developed for further miniaturization and energy reduction of optical devices. We expect circuits using these optical gates to be very effective in achieving ultralow latency. (This work was supported by CREST, JST. Grant Number JPMJCR15N4)
Biography
Akihiko Shinya is Senior Research Scientist, Supervisor, NTT Basic Research Laboratories. He received the B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Tokushima University in 1994, 1996, and 1999, respectively. In 1999, he joined NTT basic Research Laboratories. He has been engaged in R&D of photonic crystal devices. He is a member of the Japan Society of Applied Physics and the Laser Society of Japan.